Downing Street Hearings

Not quite. But Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) is doing all he can to keep the heat of the memo building despite the utter lack of coverage or reasonable political debate it has received. He has organized 105 federal lawmakers to sign a petition requesting information from the President about the revelations held within the Memo; something The Administration is cool to allow. The House Intelligence Committee, headed by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) refuses to convene around the memo, seeing a lack of validity to it. Conyers, because the Republican leadership in Congress has no interest in tracking down the truths of the memo, has convened his own Memo Hearings:

The memo, minutes of a meeting that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with aides on July 23, 2002, in London, said it "seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action." Bush has long said he didn't decide to go to war until shortly before the bombing began in March 2003.

The memo also says that the Bush White House "fixed" intelligence data to justify the war. Bush's pre-war emphasis on the danger of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction proved to be erroneous after inspectors failed to find any such weapons.

The memo came to light on May 1 in the Sunday Times of London. So far in the United States, it has triggered more of a national sigh than a gasp, but news of it spread quickly on Internet blogs.

Conyers said he's holding the hearing, which will be televised on C-SPAN 3, to uncover whether "there was a secret decision well ahead of the authority Congress had given" on Oct. 11, 2002, to Bush to launch the war. Conyers said the memo suggests that even as the Bush administration "was assuring Congress, they were secretly planning war."

Both Bush and Blair denied such allegations, but they haven't challenged the document's authenticity.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that despite the memo, nothing points "to a deliberate politicizing to get an end result" by the Bush administration. Hoekstra said his committee has no plans to investigate the memo.

This is Representative Democracy in action. Not Conyers' vigilante hearings whereby he seeks to raise attention to the documents leading up to the war which suggest anything but Administrative benevolence; but rather, the stalwart refusal to examine these documents by the leadership. It is part of a tradition of this Administration to refuse transperency. Conyers, firey as he is, is trying to combat this with American voices. He wants to deliver a petition of 500,000 signers accompanied by 105 lawmakers to the White House Lawn to open this story.

Is the level of passive-resistence to this story because it could, potentially, be something much bigger...?

Sign Conyer's Petition. Support Congressional Vigilantism [not border patrol vigilantism!].
Voice your opinions [ or better yet... mine! ] .
Watch CSpan 3 [Conyers' hearing is scheduled to start 2:30 PM ET. That "watch" link should take you right there].

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Justin Raimondo, also at the HPost, brings up a video clip from a film called Hijacking Catastrophe.